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Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category
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Tuesday, May 4th, 2010The Red Ring Strikes
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009Just as I was getting back into GTA IV in a big way over the past few nights, my Xbox 360 Elite red ringed today. It started with freezing and white vertical artifacts. They were lines of a sort. The 360 froze every time I booted it, but no red rings. For a while I wasn’t getting any ring at all. Once I unplugged the power and plugged it back in I got the red ring.
Microsoft’s online return website was easy to use. I just registered the console and picked the option to have a box sent. No muss no fuss. Now I just have to wait for the box and the transfer to happen.
I didn’t expect to ever get the red ring. My console is about 15 months old from the time of purchase (it is about 30 months since the manufacture date). The console hasn’t had any prior problems. I’d also heard anecdotally that Elites seemed to have less red ring problems. It was probably just the case that there were less Elites out there to red ring so you don’t hear about them as much. I can dream of getting a Jasper Elite as an exchange, but it’s doubtful. I don’t think any have been found in the wild yet.
Now to figure out what I want to play on my PS3 or PC. Maybe I’ll finally play through Crisis Core on the PSP. My library is feeling very 360 slanted all of a sudden.
Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme Doesn’t Fit
Thursday, May 15th, 2008Well, I finally got around to pulling my motherboard out of the case to attach the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme cooler. One of the screws was under a hard drive, which required me to unscrew both of my hard drives to get at it. The thermal paste application process was a little more trying than I had hoped. The tube provided by Thermalright for the paste seems to stick so much that when you finally get some of the paste out, you get too much. There was much cleanup with alcohol swabs based on my couple of attempts to get it right. I’m still not sure it is perfect but it seems to work.
I did the heatsink installation with the motherboard out of the case, because I found that I couldn’t hold the backing on with the motherboard in the case. After replacing the motherboard it became apparent that the cooler will not fit in my current case. If you are considering buying this cooler, measure your case! A good rule of thumb is that if the case is only as wide as your power supply, it is too small. I read a post from someone who said “all cases that are ATX compliant are a certain width and the cooler will work”. That advice is simply wrong. Most tower cases are ~8″ wide will accommodate the cooler, but I’m struggling to find any desktop/HTPC case that will. My case is probably 6″ tall and the cooler itself is taller than that.
My search for a good replacement case has focused on looking for cases that are “4U” and may just fit cooler. I would prefer to spend $100 or so, but some of the cases look to be upwards of $250. The key brands I am looking at right now are Silverstone, Thermaltake and Lian Li. In the meantime, my computer is sitting with the cover on top of the case at an angle due to the cooler that protrudes at least an inch outside the case. Now that is good cooling, but it is neither safe or aesthetically pleasing. I’d really like to get an HTPC rack-case and put all of my AV equipment on a rack. Every time I’ve looked into it, the cost has been prohibitively expensive. The rack market is still almost exclusively B2B.
iPhone Headphone Construction Quality is Awful
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I was a day 0 purchaser of the iPhone. I waited in line for about 30 minutes on the release date to buy the phone. That was mostly because I wanted to see the crowd and event. There was no way that I was going to do the all day wait. Regardless, the Christiana Mall in Delaware isn’t exactly tech-central USA.
About 4 months after I bought the phone, I started to get some buzzing in the left ear. It didn’t happen all of the time, but it was definitely repeatable. Chocking it up to damage from carrying the earphones in my pocket every day, I bought an new set for $29 at the Apple Store. The second set lasted a little less than 4 months and exhibited the same left-ear buzzing problem. My third set was purchased a couple of months ago, but within a month it was starting exhibit a similar buzzing. It was a little more faint, but was there. At this point, it can no longer be a coincidence. Three sets of headphones and three left-ear buzzing problems. Something is decidedly wrong with Apple’s (or the outsources) design or construction on these headphones.
Apple will allow service exchanges of headphones on their website. If you go through support, you can issue a claim as long as your phone is still under warranty. Since no iPhone is over a year old right now, they are all under warranty. Make sure you process a replacement rather than shell out for the $29. Apple promptly sent me a replacement, and it promptly failed to work properly. The headphone remote clicker doesn’t work reliably. At first it didn’t work at all, and now it only works sometimes. None of my other iPhone headphones had that problem.
To recap, I’ve paid Apple $60 for new sets of headphones on top of the iPhone price and have received 4 faulty headsets. Not a good rate at all. Now I need to send back the 3 current headsets that I have to get replacements. I wonder at what point they will block me from exchanging due to the frequency. If you do have a similar problem, make sure you keep your faulty headset because you’ll need to return to Apple as proof.
PC Assembly Update – Ordering the Thermalright Cooler
Thursday, May 8th, 2008- After experiencing somewhat high temperatures on my Q6600 with the stock heatsink, I decided that an expensive aftermarket heatsink would make the processor last longer even if I didn’t massively overclock it. I also decided (read: justified to myself) that a $60-$70 cooler would give me the performance of nearly $1,000 processor. I purchased the universally agreed best air-cooled solution. It is the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme. It runs about $60 from a bunch of different online vendors. Strangely Newegg doesn’t ever seem to have any in stock. I ended up ordering from Directron. I purchased the recommended 120mm Scythe S-Flex Fan at the highest speed to go with it.
- Last night I finally got around to trying to install the Thermalright heat sync. The fan clips are strange if this is your first time working with them. Look at the pictures on the website if you get into trouble. Once you figure out how they work it isn’t a problem fitting them. The one snafu I ran into is that you have to pull out your motherboard to install this thing. Boo. There is a backplate that goes under the motherboard to affix the cooler to. It was too late to start the motherboard removal project, so I stopped at that point. I’ll probably install it this weekend. Maybe I’ll do it sooner if I get some time.
- The Thermalright comes with Thermalright Chill Factor in the box, so you don’t need to buy Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease. The reviews say that both pastes work about the same. I saw two reviews and they were split on which grease was 1 degree Celsius better than the other. I actually had some
Arctic Silver on hand that I was going to use, but now I’ll use the chill factor. Application methods seem to have changed slightly from what I remember. You now only need to put a relatively thin line across the processor rather than lightly covering the whole processor as I remember. Chances are that I was just doing it wrong. I also learned that Arctic Silver doesn’t go bad in the tube. You just get rid of the little part of the liquid that separates at the top. Apparently you are also supposed to replace thermal grease every year. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, which might be why my processors seem to die after 3 years or so.
Intel’s Impressive Quad-Core Positioning
Thursday, May 8th, 2008Intel has done an impressive job of positioning an underclocked entry-level chip at a price point to drive penetration of quad cores. The Q6600 price is competitive to dual core chips. Meanwhile, the cost of faster quad-core processors ramps up rapidly. Intel is retaining massive price discrimination through this mechanism. This strategy is really smart because it drives quad-core adoption, which leads to application optimization. Companies and less price sensitive users will buy the more expensive processors to run the optimized applications as fast as possible. Intel will make more money through this cycle than they would if they just sold the processors at a high price.
Smart power-users are happy because they get a cheap processor that over-clocks well even though it is multiplier locked. Intel pretty much owns the enthusiast market right now. So Intel wins the enthusiast market and price discriminates while driving adoption of quad-core. All the chips go through the same fab process, so production costs are low even on the high-end chips. Now their 45nm process chips are coming out. Not bad at all. No wonder AMD is in trouble.
New PC Assembly – Abit uGuru
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008Abit & UAC
- The abit uGuru software and Vista x64 will work together but don’t like each other much. I finally got the program to work, but UAC complains every time and asks me to approve the application on startup. Yuck.
- UAC can be disabled, but that method has been referred to as “brute force” in many of the posts that I have read. I’m not sure what the real risk is although there may be some “incompatibilities” caused for programs that are meant to work with it. All I really want is an “Always Allow” choice that any security these days has. There is a “Local Security Policy” program for Vista but apparently Vista Home Premium users don’t get it. Boo. Doesn’ t Microsoft realize that having users turn off UAC altogether is a bigger issue than any additional revenue generated by users buying “Ultimate” for this feature?
- Abit needs to work on their website management. First I installed uGuru off the US website. It didn’t work and was older than the version on my disk! Next I installed the disk version. It still didn’t work. Finally I went to the Abit Global site and downloaded a still newer version. Abit needs to get its act together on the website. Why would the English Language Global site refer to a different database of drivers from the US site? It just doesn’t make sense.
New PC Assembly Day 2
Thursday, April 17th, 2008I broke down and paid the $100 to buy a Corsair 750 Watt power supply at Microcenter last night. I also spent $5 buying two sets of drive rails to mount the hard drives in the larger cd-rom bays of my existing case. I couldn’t bring myself to spend another $200 for the great Thermaltake HTPC case that they had in stock. I look for a sale or maybe ask for a case as a gift at some point.
The Corsair power supply is really nice. I never though I’d say that about a PSU. It comes in a little felt bag. The box was huge. I was a bit concerned that it wouldn’t fit in my case, but I trusted the ATX compliance. It ended up fitting in fine. This power supply could easily power a server, so I had a bunch of extra cable that I was able to bunch up in the area where the hard drives would normally have been installed.
Installation went fine, save for some annoyance on screwing together and screwing in the hard drives and rails. Easy installation access isn’t always possible with ATX cases, particularly for smaller ones that you don’t pay an arm and a leg for. Everything was running fine.
Now for the obligatory failure story. On first boot, the motherboard emitted a high pitched whine and it didn’t boot. I’m tremendously impressed with Abit for including the on-motherboard numerical read-out for error-codes as well as on-motherboard power and reset switches. It greatly improves troubleshooting, at least in theory. My error codes didn’t appear to be in the manual, so I just checked all of my connections and what could be wrong. For some reason the fan on the graphics card wasn’t moving at all.
I knew that the new PCI-E graphics cards required additional power. There was a molex connector on the motherboard right next to the 8800GTS that I had connected. What about those 4-pin connectors labeled PCI-E. I hadn’t seen a place to plug those in and though the Molex was serving that purpose. I was wrong. The PCI-E card power connector was on the end of the card where I hadn’t seen it. I connected the power to the graphics card and we were in business!
The first thing I noticed was that my RAM was showing up at a slower speed. Once in the Bios, I saw that the voltage being supplied was 1.8v rather than the higher 2.1v that was correct for my RAM. Obviously auto-calibration isn’t working very well these days. After double-checking the correct voltage for my Corsair XMS2 DHE on two websites, I changed it. Strangely, Corsair didn’t list the voltage specs anywhere in or on the packaging. I was tempted to start playing with CPU overclocking, but not yet. Let’s get things stable first.
Setting up Raid was the next challenge. When I last set up a Raid array it was done through the bios. Were things still the same or had the set-up change to inside Vista? Although it wasn’t clear in the manual, I found online that it is still a BIOS setting. CTRL-I gets you in after the first Bios screen. In the main Bios, the SATA type has to be set to RAID before moving to this step. The setup was quick and I chose a Stripe (Strip in the Abit Bios) size of 16k based on the speed data I was able to find online. My previous Raid 0 array ended up in total data loss. I promise to automatically back up to my NAS box this time.
The final step of the night was Vista setup. I ordered Vista Premium 32-bit OEM System Builder, which I later regretted. I decided that I wanted to go with 64-bit from the start. That way I can get all the juice out of my RAM and Quad-core CPU. Luckily, Microsoft has done away with the myriad of licensing restrictions that cause OEM disks and OEM keys only to work with each other. The same was true for retail, and there were lots of problems around specific disks, key, and hardware characteristics. I remember having to order a specific Inspiron 6000 CD from Dell to reinstall XP on my wife’s laptop, because the code wouldn’t work with any other OEM or Retail disc. I commend Microsoft for moving to a model that makes things easier. Your code now designates the level of product (Basic, Premium, or Ultimate) and whether or not you can transfer the license from motherboard to motherboard (OEM vs Retail). For Retail purchasers, Microsoft has a site where you can order new media. If you bought 32-bit and you wanted 64-bit, you can buy the disc for $10-$15. If you purchased an OEM copy, the site will not give you that option. If you are able to get a 64-bit disc through some other method, it will work fine. I proved it last night as my 64-bit install went off without a hitch.
Now I’m downloading all of the relevant patches and drivers and everything seems to be working fine. Vista Service Pack 1 appears to be a manual download only at this point. If you go to the Windows Download Center you can get it. I plan to install it this evening. Tonight it might be time for a little Crysis.
